There are three options to determine the timing of when notifications should be sent: Off, Immediate, and Asynchronous:

Off means no notifications will be sent, no ping plugins will be called…

Immediate is the default option and it means notifications will be sent immediately after each post or comment publication. Note that this option is guaranteed to work but may create a visible delay in processing after each new post or comment is published.

Asynchronous means notifications will be sent asynchronously ("in the background") with a Scheduled Job. This may be the best option but you need to properly set up the Scheduler for this to work. Once this is set up, b2evolution will create a new scheduled task for each published post. That job will take care of sending out the notifications when it’s executed by the scheduler.

Notifications get sent only once

When notifications are sent, a flag is set in the post and even if you unpublish the post and publish it again, the notifications will not be sent again. This is to avoid unwanted "spam".

Sending notifications in the future

When you set the "issue date" of a post in the future, it typically won’t be visible immediately (unless you change the default Collection Post Features).

Therefore, the notifications should not be sent out immediately either. They should be sent out at the time the post becomes public.

To resolve this, by using Asynchronous notifications, b2evolution can schedule notifications to go out in the future, at the desired date and time:

Publishing a post in the future creates a scheduled job to send out notifications in the future.

Note: b2evolution will re-schedule the notification task if you change the issue date before the notifications get sent out for the first time.

Demo install and Demo posts

The sample posts installed by b2evolution are flagged as "notifications have already been sent". Thus, these posts will never try to send out notifications.

Additionally, when you run a test installation on localhost, ping plugins will detect that sending out pings to public services would not allow anyone to see your posts and those pings will be skipped.